
Book M\8,, 

Copiglit}J° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSir. 



Ci^e 3S^o«]^ of a jEan 



YOUNG MEN'S SERIES 

Woxtl) of a ifflan 

BY 

CLELAND BOYD McAFEE, D.D. 

Author of 



"THE TENTH COMMANDMENT A PRESENT LAW,' 

"WHERE HE IS,'- "WHEREFORE DIDST THOIT 

DOUBT?" "FAITH. FELLOWSHIP AND 

FEALTY." 



pubfijiKjeti for tte 
of <r?)icagfl 



The Winona PublisKing Company 
Chicago, 111. Winona Lake, Ind. 



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CONGRESS, I 



COPYBIGHT, 1903 



TKB YOUNG MEN'S PBESBYTEBIAN UNION 
OF CHICAGO 



To the young men of Tlie Forty-first 
Street Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 
who were much in mind when this sermon 
was preached, and at whose request it is 
published. 



The Worth of a Man 



THE WOETH OF A MAN 

"What is man, that Thou art mindful of 
him?" Psalm 8:4 

The question never meant more 
than now. It came to David in his 
thinking of the heavens, of which he 
knew much less than we know, getting 
his mind charged with thought of their 
greatness and order and beauty; let- 
ting his thought run on to God as the 
Maker and Ruler of all that, and then 
coming to man, of whom God seems to 
think, and for whom He seems to plan. 
Think first of God, then think of the 
heavens, the universe, then think of 
man, and all personal prejudice aside, 
prejudice by which we magnify our 
own importance, answer what there is 
about man that makes God mindful of 
him. 

It is not so much a query about what 
7 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

he is in himself. It is a query about 
him in his relations. When the 
heavens are considered, what is man? 
When God is thought of, what is man? 
We build our towers of three hundred 
feet and call them great, but what are 
they when we consider the distance of 
the sun from us? A spider's web is 
delicate and graceful, but when we 
consider the heavy cables on which the 
great bridges swing and do not sway — 
what is it? Man is great? Yes, until 
you think of the heavens. Man is 
mighty? Yes, until you consider the 
omnipotent God who made and controls 
the myriad hosts of heaven. 

With one meaning and another, the 
question has not ceased to be asked. 
Not only have the schools been answer- 
ing it by their study of individual man 
in psychology and ethics and physiol- 
ogy, and by their study of corporate 
man in sociology and political economy, 
but the development of science has 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

forced the question as never before — 
what is man, and what is his place in 
the universe? 

At least two important answers 
beside the answer of the Word of God 
have been made, and are worth your 
considering. 

1. There are many who say that 
man is only a part of a general plan, 
part and parcel of what is all about 
him. Poets tell him he is * 'brother to 
the stone he kicks with shodden feet." 
Some physiologists trace the close like- 
ness between his own bones and the 
skeleton of the dog and the horse and 
the cow and tell him he is a quadruped 
who walks upright — that and nothing 
more. Some psychologists trace all 
his knowledge to sensations, teach him 
to believe that he has no soul apart 
from that bundle of experiences which 
at any moment he realizes — tell him 
he is a sensitive clod — that and nothing 
more. 

9 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

And the alleged facts are real facts. 
The skeleton of a man is singularly 
like that of other quadrupeds. No 
doubt he is a quadruped walking 
upright. But some say he is nothing 
more. He does receive much of his 
knowledge through his senses exactly 
as his dog receives his. But some say 
he has no other knowledge. 

We are told that Copernicus dragged 
man down from his self-appointed 
throne. He thought he was unique in 
the universe, that the sun and all the 
system revolved around the earth. He 
was most important on the earth, so he 
became the center of the universe. All 
existed for him; he became the cap- 
sheaf; he became the climax of all 
existence. Then Copernicus discov- 
ered that the earth is itself revolving 
about the sun ; others have added that 
the earth is a very small speck in even 
our own system and that our whole solar 
system is a- mere dot in the heavens 
10 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

compared with others. "We have 
learned that if our earth and the sun 
were put an inch apart, we should 
need to put our mark to indicate the 
nearest fixed star three miles away. 
If we seek proportions, our sun might 
have a globe two feet in diameter for 
its symbol, then being smaller than 
many a star that twinkles across the 
space to us, but even so, our earth 
should have but a dried pea from the 
garden for its symbol. As you go 
home this night from the house of 
God, the light of the Pole Star will 
come to you, but you are seeing light 
fifty years old, so far away is it, yet 
our sun's light comes to us in eight 
minutes. There are stars whose light 
left them when Abraham was not yet 
born and has not reached us. So much 
does our little dried pea of an earth 
amount to ! And man on the earth — 
what does he amount to? Well, if he 
and all his race were wiped off the 
11 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

earth, there are no scales fine enough 
to note the difference in its weight. 
He is a late comer upon the globe, 
however long he has been here, and if 
the six thousand years of common 
belief were multiplied by ten, he is 
still a creature of yesterday. When he 
dies — what? When a tree dies — what? 
When a mole that burrows in the dirt 
dies — what? You answer all when 
you answer one. 

I beg you to believe me, brethren, 
this is a most serious view that some 
are trying to take of man's place in 
the universe. He is part and parcel 
of all that is around him. These men 
die with little expectation of anything 
beyond. One of them wrote to the 
author of a book on the immortality of 
the soul, that he supposed he had 
made out his case, but why in heaven's 
name had he cared to do it? — that he 
knew no good to come from another 
life and hoped this life were all. 
13 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

Another has expressed his humiliation 
in thinking of men who must needs 
desire another life to reward them for 
what they have done in this. Another 
had nothing to say but that it seemed 
a sad waste that so much of love and 
thought and volition should vanish in 
the drawing of a breath. It is not a 
careless view merely, though it is 
often that. It is partly a sober, sad 
view of men who are overwhelmed by 
the large facts of the universe. 

2. Others count man the flower of 
history, small, in some senses impor- 
tant, but no more than a part or an 
element in the progress of things. 
Here his feebleness, rather than the 
greatness of the facts about, is in view. 
Pascal's term, meant otherwise, ex- 
presses it: '*Man is a mere thinking 
reed." Indeed, what a narrow margin 
man has on the earth ! His animal life 
has narrow limits and these men count 
it the only life. Six miles off the 
13 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

earth even afc the equator, the cold 
would destroy it ; six miles within the 
earth, the heat would destroy it. Pos- 
sibly he might live on one other planet 
in our system; he could live in his 
present form on no other. He is a 
mere dependent creature. He could 
neither eat nor drink but for the sun. 
Yet the sun's blessing must come to 
him tempered by the atmosphere. Let 
him boast of his strength and a clot 
forms on the brain from very pulsing 
of proud blood, and he becomes a piti- 
able imbecile or wildly insane. He is 
held in bondage to the conditions that 
brought him forth, and to the demands 
made on him by his own needs. He 
is part of a machine. He thinks he is 
free. He talks about how he chooses 
to do this or that, talks about his will 
and his decisions; but he is deluded. 
If he means that he ever breaks that 
chain of causation that governs his 
acts, he talks not truth nor falsehood, 
U 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 



but simple nonsense. 'No man's will 
affects the world about him, nor is 
there what common men call will at all. 
Nature has resulted in man — that says 
it all. 

My brethren, I have stated these two 
views with unwonted fullness. I do 
not in the slightest degree caricature 
them. Men in scholarly and in com- 
mon life say and feel all those things. 
Quotations are buried in much that 
has been said, and I have omitted 
names only lest we might be diverted 
from the main thought. I would not 
have you suppose that all men who 
know and hold the same facts reach 
the same conclusions. All that about 
our littleness in the universe is true, 
whatever inferences we reach. All 
that about the precariousness of our 
lives is true, wherever it lands us. 
And men have reached those saddening 
conclusions by losing sight of other 
facts just as real and just as forcible. 
15 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

Of course what I care for now is the 
effect they have on men who hold 
them. They sheer man of his dignity 
in the effort to make him fit in humbly 
into physical nature. They make the 
most important facts of a man's being 
sink out of sight. And they affect the 
very springs of human life. Much of 
a man's conduct is determined by the 
view he takes of himself. You have 
seen the extreme of egotism wherein a 
man lives a pompous self-satisfied life. 
You have seen men so self -abased that 
they could not render the world their 
proper service. And thus you have seen 
how necessary it is for every man to 
estimate himself fairly. There sat in 
my study a little while ago a man 
whom I have heard mentioned as the 
keenest observer of conditions in lo wer 
iN'ew York. In a conversation so frank 
as to forbid full quotation, he told me 
that after the wholesale fact of sin, no 
obstacle so hinders the elevation of 
16 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

men and women who are depraved in 
that great city as the utter failure to 
realize the worth of a man, the dignity 
of ^ woman. The very self-satisfaction 
which marks them arises out of their 
blindness to the terrible distance 
between what they ought to be and 
what they are. And every day of their 
sordid lives dims their vision of God's 
ideal of man. The difficulty of the 
appeal to the upper part of town in 
behalf of the lower part is doubled by 
the query in the minds of men who are 
well-conditioned whether the ill-favored 
man will repay the labor. Are the 
slums after all worth the saving? — this 
has been the unspoken question. We 
have failed to realize the dignity of the 
man for whom we are laboring. We 
have failed to see that saving him 
saves something priceless. 

The trend of much popular litera- 
ture and of much scholarly study of 
the present day is against any worthy 
17 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

estimate of man. Some overrate him 
and make him a demi-god; some 
underrate him and make him only an 
animal, with no independent will, who 
can no more act differently from the 
way he does act than a lily could bear 
rosebuds. One of the leading English 
orators shocked an audience a few 
years ago by declaring that the robber, 
the ravisher and the murderer offend 
because they cannot help offending. 
It is, no doubt, a comfortable doctrine, 
if a man wants to be a beast. But 
some who hold it do not want to be 
beasts and they themselves call it a 
saddening doctrine. One man asks 
us to take his word with more confi- 
dence because it is a word of sheer 
pain. He does not enjoy his belief. 
None but a brutish man could enjoy 
it. If a man wants to feel that he may 
wander about the world, doing what- 
ever he inclines to do, and that he is 
so much a creature of fate that he 
18 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

cannot do otherwise, that he can no 
more keep from sinning than a stone 
can keep from falling when you cast it 
out of your hands, if he wants to 
believe that it makes no difference now 
or hereafter what gracious impulses he 
restrains and what bestial ones he lets 
loose — why then he may find this belief 
which makes man merely a part of 
nature, a most delightful one. He 
may believe it and have no such wishes, 
but he cannot belie\e it gladly. There 
are certain facts which are always left 
out of the account or explained away 
when a man believes such doctrines at 
any rate. We will think of some of 
these. 

What, now, is the place which the 
Word of God and the Gospel of Christ 
gives man in the universe? Thou 
madest him a little lower than the 
angels ; Thou crownest him with glory 
and honor. In the image of God made 
He man. What man? Why, every 
19 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

man. The man wlio stands in presence 
of his fellows as an unmarred image of 
God and the man who is so battered 
and bruised that the image is almost 
lost. Every man is made in the image 
of God and because he is, God holds 
every man dear. 

He made one man His Friend and 
left it for an honor that men can 
become Friends of God. From time 
to time, God has made known His will 
to man; He has sent him messages; 
He has heard his cries and answered 
his prayers. What place God gives 
man appears in the whole story of 
Christ. The sin of this petty creature 
is so painful to God, and the infinite 
heart yearns so for him that God will 
suffer and pass through death for him 
to make it possible to have him with 
Him throughout eternity. He has 
done it for no other part of His earthly 
creation. And He has by that very 
act set man on a throne from which no 
20 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

Copernicus can ever drag him down. 
You need to think that out. Almighty 
God, controlling the unmeasured 
heavens and the measureless move- 
ment of the stars, has cared for the 
sin of this little quadruped walking 
upright on his dried pea of an earth ! 
We do not make fair estimate of man's 
place in God's thought until we reckon 
in the incarnation and its meaning. 'No 
man estimates his own life accurately 
until he reckons in his own relation to 
the fact that God cares enough about 
him to die for him. Of course I know 
that some scout at the very idea of 
incarnation or modify the meaning out 
of it. But I know also that they who 
do so leave out or explain away the 
greatest facts in the human nature and 
life. I asked a friend once what he 
thought man's chief dignity. He 
replied, *'That he can sin." I add to 
that: **And that God cares enough 
about him to save him." No man who 
21 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

believes in the incarnation can ever 
consciously place a low estimate on 
himself and mistake his place in the 
universe. In physical nature he may 
be least and, as Scripture says, like the 
grass of the field, but he has that in 
him which lifts him so unmeasurably 
above nature that he cannot be ranked 
with it. He walks about in nature as 
God's deputy, lord in it, subject only 
to laws of God which he may apply 
and adjust in almost sovereign ways. 

There are four facts about man 
which set him in this peculiar relation 
to God and to the rest of the world. 
They are not facts of his own making 
nor of his own controlling. They are 
in his nature because he was made by 
God in the image of God. These four 
facts ally him to God, and raise him 
above all other creatures of the world. 
I say four. You will miss mention of 
Reason, a fifth, which could be pressed 
but may now be omitted. 
22 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

The first fact v/hich isolates man 
from the world and makes him like 
God, is that he has a conscience. So 
mighty is it that one of the wise men 
declares it is only fair to say that con- 
science has the man rather than man 
the conscience. He knows how to 
say, I ought, against any inclination 
or wish. He knows how to ap- 
prove and condemn himself. He 
has the wonderful power to apprehend 
the law of God and to make it a motive 
in his life. He has an ear to hear God 
say : This is duty. As some one puts 
it: ''He can taste the moral flavor of 
deeds." The ancients called con- 
science the voice of God in the soul. 
It is that in some true sense. It is 
the human recognition of divine com- 
mand, and it speaks in every human 
soul. A school superintendent in 
one of our large cities remarked 
recently that there were probably 
100,000 children in his city of school 
23 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

age who had never heard of such a 
book as the Bible. Let that be true, 
yet among these is not one who does 
not know that he ought 7iot to do some 
things and that he ought to do some 
things. Conscience lifts a man above 
all questions of policy; it makes him 
see that there is law governing him. So 
powerful is it that men who are afraid 
of nothing else are afraid to do wrong — 
not afraid of suffering and of punish- 
ment, but afraid of that voice that will 
say: ^*You are wrong, you are wrong." 
Man's conscience lets him hear God so 
clearly that he cannot even ask why, 
when the voice says, ''You ought." 

And in this man is unique. Here is 
a power that waits upon no public 
opinion or esteem. Man is the only 
creature who in the midst of the most 
desolated of earth's desert islands may 
be stricken with a heartbreaking 
remorse. Your dog dreads the pun- 
ishment you may give him. Man feels 
24 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

his sin worst when no eye sees him 
and he is alone with the wrong he has 
done. Some of you have stood by 
Lake Lucerne and looked up on Mount 
Pilatus. You may know the tradition 
of its name, how Pilate after he had 
condemned the innocent Christ, could 
never wash the stain from his hands 
though he dipped them in the water of 
all seas. When there came across the 
mountains the story of the lake on the 
summit of this peak, whose waters 
were fresh from the heavens, unsullied 
by the filth of earth, he climbed by 
painful stages to its brink and sought 
to wash the stain away, but when he 
looked, his hands yet bore the mark of 
the sin he had wrought and in despair 
he plunged into the lake to his death. 
From this, the Swiss say, came the 
mountain's name. It is a tragedy of 
conscience. Here is a power which 
could make the Lady Macbeth bemoan 
a stain on her little hand which no 
25 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

other eye than hers could see. No 
water could wash out the stain. Here 
verily is a marvelous power. It drives 
us to great deeds and shames us for 
mean ones. It condemns us unspar- 
ingly. It never flatters us. It throbs 
away in a man's life like one of God's 
great bells, ringing, ''You ought. You 
ought," and it never misses a stroke. 
The second fact in man's supremacy 
is, that he has a will. Some say that 
he is a will. He is self-governing — 
within bounds, yes, not an anarchist, 
but able to hear that bell tolling, 
"You ought," and to declare, "I will 
not," or to declare, "I vnll." He is 
the only creature of God's earth who 
ever rebels against God, and so he 
is the only creature whose obedience 
to God is voluntary. He cannot be 
made to submit. He can rebel through 
all eternity. John speaks of an eternal 
sin; it is possible to commit it. He 
can be made to yield feigned obedi- 
26 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

ence, but no power can storm the inner 
citadel of his will. A friend at my 
table spoke of a heap of ruins in an 
Arizona valley as the greatest of our 
national ruins. In God's world, man 
is His greatest ruin, a ruin, but a great 
ruin — not worth saving as a ruin, but 
worth using to make something other 
than a ruin out of him. Nor does any 
man lose his power of choice while here 
before God. Let no man judge his 
brother and let not us, who are here, 
sit in condemnation of men weaker 
than ourselves. But for ourselves let 
us blink no fact of the moral life. 
Whatever may be true of others, we at 
least have not lost our power of choice. 
We are driven by no merciless force into 
any slightest or greatest wrong which 
we commit. Always we are bad 
because we choose to be bad. Always 
the word is true that tells how God 
begins to help men by renewing their 
wills. Responsibility is the great, 
27 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

pressing fact which no bad man can 
escape. And God, by renewing his 
will, can make any man able to 
meet his responsibility without flinch- 
ing. 

The third fact which makes man 
God's chief creation, is that he is con- 
scious of immortality. T7e need not 
quibble about the proof of that. Who- 
ever denies it would have the human 
consciousness to deal with. John 
Fiske is right, and you know he is 
right, when he calls an undying human 
soul a postulate of all religion, and 
because religion postulates that true 
thing, it is an everlasting reality. 
Science does not pretend to prove the 
immortality of the human soul; it 
proves that nothing forbids it. Even 
religion does not pretend to prove it. 
It is one of the facts which underlies 
all religion, and which no religion has 
ever denied. There is no better proof 
of it than the conviction of every 
28 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

man's consciousness. You remember 
how finely Tennjson says it: 

Tliou wilt not leave us in the dust: 
Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 

And Thou hast made him : Thou art just. 

We often go to the mountains for 
our illustrations; let us seek another 
there. A tiny child is playing at a 
mountain's base, a tiny fragile being 
who picks up pebbles as burdens and 
does not reach the stature of the 
shrubs among which he plays. Sud- 
denly down the slope there comes, 
crashing and leaping and plunging, a 
great boulder. The child sees and 
lifts tiny hands to protect himself, but 
in one of its final leaps the stone 
strikes him and leaves a mere mangled 
heap. Itself settles near by, unhurt. 
In the conflict the child went down, 
the stone conquered. But did it? 
The wise men say that after ages of 
years the earth and all it contains will 
29 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

be reduced to other forms and 
destroyed. No matter how far away 
that may be, when that stone has dis- 
integrated, and the precipices over 
which it leaped are worn to the level 
and the mountain has become a rub- 
bish heap of a ruined world, that soul, 
dashed out of the body on the summer 
day, will be still in its full vigor of life, 
triumphant over death, swinging on 
its journey in an endless life. In the 
conflict the stone went down, the child 
conquered. It passes thought, as 
immortality passes mortality, but be 
sure that the consciousness of man's 
heart tells him no lie, and leads him 
on no fruitless quest. After all the 
ages of the earth have gone, after all 
the forms to which he has been allied 
have ceased to be, that which was most 
truly himself, shall yet he^ shall yet live. 
Such a fact, so marvelous and momen- 
tous, sets this creature of God on high. 
If he is brought to submission, it is for 
30 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

eternity. If he is left to rebellion, it 
is for equal eternity. 

Tlie fourth fact which makes man 
chief among God's creatures is that he 
has a yearning after God. He has such 
an intellect that he can know God. 
Into his finiteness can come knowledge 
of infinity. Into his impotence can 
come knowledge of omnipotence. He 
can look into the depths of his own 
nature and find there in the moral law 
proofs of the character of God. He 
can look at nature about him and think 
back of it to God ; and as his knowl- 
edge of nature increases, his wonder 
and adoration can increase. There is 
more in man than intellect — there is 
heart, affection, love. And it is with 
this side of his nature that he reaches 
out most eagerly for God But even 
if he shou.ld not jqslyr after God, God 
knows he can do so, and desires his 
love. That yearning of God for human 
love and trust came to pathetic voice 
81 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

when the God-man stood on Olivet 
looking across upon the holy city. 
I have never heard the cry He then 
gave quoted, without feeling that its 
deepest meaning cannot be put into 
human voice. Standing there, with 
consciousness of divinity, He cried: 
"How often would / have gathered 
thy children together — but ye would 
not!" No man could say that, 
however great he might be; but a 
God-man could say it and only God 
could feel it. Here we reach the 
very apex of the human character — its 
possibility of fellowship with God. No 
other earthly creature shows any such 
power. This one is so constituted that 
he can enter into such communion 
with God as will bring him into 
renewed divine likeness, and make 
him able to abide in God's eternal 
home forever. Over that new Jeru- 
salem God's heart will never ache, and 
there will be no cry of: "Ye would 
33 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

not," for within shall be all those but 
only those who are willing that God's 
will shall be done in them and by 
them. 

These are the four traits in man's 
nature that answer the question of 
God's care for him: his conscience, 
whereby he becomes able to know 
God's moral law ; his will, whereby he 
becomes a responsible, voluntary agent 
under that law; his consciousness of 
immortality, whereby he ceases to be 
the creature of a day and becomes a 
partaker of God's own unending life ; 
his yearning after God, whereby, 
through divine response, he comes into 
fellowship with God through all eter- 
nity. 

In view of all that, true for you and 
for all of us, how are you, my brother, 
taking life? How did you live your 
yesterday? Did you go on the errands 
of your business or your profession, 
walking God's earth as chief in it? 
33 
LofC. 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

Did you live in sight of the law of 
God? Did you live as one whose will 
might hold him to the right or wreck 
him in the wrong? Did you live as 
though the day were but a part of the 
endless life, its deeds fitting into the 
plans of the eternal purpose? Did 
you live as one with right to look up 
into the face of God and see Him there 
your Father and your Friend? And 
how did you estimate the man whose 
life you touched on yesterday? Did 
he seem to you a being whose fellow- 
ship might mean great things to God? 
Did you touch him for eternity? Or 
did he pass on from your life unhelped, 
his soul unnoticed, his life left the 
petty thing of this day? 

For we are great in God's world. 
We are set on high. Shall we then go 
our YiSLj proud and self-satisfied, ready 
to patronize God and underestimate the 
marvelous grace that makes us meet 
for such fellowship? A few weeks ago 
34 



THE WORTH OF A MAN 

I received a catalogue of the output of 
a fine pottery-works. As I looked at 
the illustrations of fine vases and ewers 
and cups, it was difficult to remember 
that they were of themselves but clay, 
ready to thicken and clot at every rain- 
fall, only waste and wreck, until 
skilled hands laid hold upon it and 
worked it over and moulded it and 
decorated it and burned it. Then the 
potter might take the clay and count 
it joy to have it in his home, might 
tell his friends of its beauty and grace. 
But shall the clay which owes all it is 
to the Potter lift up proud voice 
against Him and claim honor for 
itself? Or shall it say as did the great 
Apostle to us Gentiles: "By His grace 
I am what I am!" Surely, this befits 
our manhood — that we should find our 
greatness completed by His grace who 
has made us all we are. 



35 



NOV 13 1903 



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